Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers have become increasingly popular as personal navigational aids and, more frequently, as features integrated into consumer electronics, such as cellular telephones and wireless personal data assistants, as well as automobile navigation systems. GPS signals are received from a constellation of navigational satellites and processed into locational coordinates. GPS receivers are passive devices that provide locational data only, which must be combined with maps, charts, and other navigational aids to bring meaning to the latitude and longitude coordinates. Integrating GPS receivers into consumer electronics or navigation systems has enabled users to retrieve helpful travel-related information and, in some configurations, to store additional information. However, such information generally remains personal to the user, unless specifically shared or posted through some form of digital data communications, such as e-mail, text messaging, or Web sites.
Recently, Web logs or “blogs,” have begun to proliferate as a new form of Web-based digital data communication. Blogs are on-line forums for the sharing of the personal thoughts of a “blogger,” as well as other types of information, such as images, sounds, and video clips. Blogs are publicly accessible journals or diaries that are often updated on a frequent basis. Blog readers are invited to post their comments and submit their own information for other readers to consider.
Blogs are a form of interactive Web site with content written and published by the individual blogger. Typically, blogs include an unstructured text narrative that might be organized by date or topic, yet can often cover rambling and wide-ranging topics, as reflected by the blogger's personal tastes. Still, blog information can be useful, such as where a blogger chronicles travels in a region of particular interest. Regular readers can generally identify pertinent travel information easily. However, other readers must use search engines or similar technologies to mine pertinent travel information out of the blog and, once found, such information may not be of the type or caliber sought.
While travel-themed blogs can potentially provide valuable personal travel insights, on-line databases of locational information can also provide travel information, but in a more structured and consistent form. These databases are often well-indexed and searchable, but esoteric information is rare and the sharing of personalized travel information is generally unsupported or unavailable. Furthermore, locations of arcane or limited interest, such as vacuum cleaner museums, may not be available in locational information databases. As well, these types of locations may not be of a sufficient interest level to warrant the time and expense of a dedicated Web site for those aficionados so inclined.
Moreover, such databases, when organized by geolocational data, such as available though a GPS, are frequently structured to address the narrow problem of providing an identity to a set of raw coordinates. Frequently, the geolocational data is indexed under pre-defined categories or key words without provision for adding additional information or user personalization. Moreover, the structure and content is generally managed by a private database administrator, which does not allow for shared on-line customization or collaboration.
Therefore, there is a need for an approach to providing an on-line compendium of arbitrary unstructured geolocational data and associated metadata. Preferably, such an approach would provide a customizable data collection navigable in outline form and searchable by coordinates and other parameters. Such an approach would preferably further accommodate different types of data in various formats as the metadata with controllable and transferable permissions.